Skip your class tomorrow. Seriously, you don’t want to go; I don’t want you to go. Besides, what has learning how to calculate standard error or Diels-Alder ever personally done for you? Simply schemes we memorize with the hope of seeing high marks on the next exam, a means to an intangible end. Leave your cell phone and laptop in the dorm. Check your fears and apprehensions at the door; trust me they’ll still be there when you get back. No one wants to take those anyway.
So take your heaviest boots out of the closet, the ones inscribed with all your anxieties, brush off the settled dust, and step into them. I’m sure they’ll be uncomfortable at first but soon you’ll find that you actually enjoy their feeling; there is something metaphorically satisfying about treading all over your angst.
Proceed out the door and down the street. Where you go from here is up to you and your boots; there is nothing to tie you back to the warmth of the dorm room. Get in a car, without a map, and drive or be driven. To where? Where would make you happy? Only Forty-eight short hours exist before they send out the dogs.
Adopt a policy of yes; buy a stranger’s lunch. Anything that makes you nervous, do. Nobody knows who you are, and they’ll doubtfully see you again after your intrusion into their routine lives, so you have nothing to lose by being sociable. Become like those animals mocking our methodical lives—shed any objections and obligations. Once you stop listening to your own subconscious and simply subsist the whole world will open up and the multitude of imperfections make themselves known. Notice how perfect they are! Each person is flecked with their own individuality yet yearns for the same goal, to love and to be loved, let’s hope that is enough.
Do not focus on material things. Do not worry about that test you missed today. Do not love what is intangible, that promise of a brighter future if we follow all the right rules. Do not adore what is impossible; nothing hinders a heart full of life.
Hit rock bottom and discover that friendship, warmth, and happiness are all that is needed to sustain you. Become so far removed from your old self that they become unrecognizable. True change comes from within those who have the least. It is time we hasten that decline.
Search for love, search for life, and enjoy all the small things along the way.
Bonus points: convince a friend to come along with you and your heavy boots.
Mike,
First of all, props for beauteous writing. It is a pleasure to read and re-read and savor. Second, I have increasingly been running up against that struggle of “lov[ing] the intangible, that promise of a brighter future if we follow all the right rules.” With study abroad looming over my head, it is almost impossible to stay in the moment, almost like I’m itching to get out of the skin I’m in and into the skin of that girl in an awesome floor-length skirt meandering the streets of Tunis. However, it is still true that that is yet intangible, and I am still at UR chained to a schedule that isn’t going away for another two months. So I will join you in the present, because it is really the best place to be, even when it doesn’t always feel like it!